Leaving

I suppose I better start now. I am not going to be anymore amicable to myself later on to talk about my feelings that I am having right now.

I appreciate all the hugs friends have been giving me. Hugs are really good. Going to Asia is completely nerve-wrecking.

I suppose hearing all year last year from people telling me about their identity changing experience final persuaded me to go. Hari, Patrick, Leah in particular stuck out in my mind. Shit.

Where is home?

The last ten years, I have been telling myself the comfortable lie that I am special. I am Asian: let the masses of white fuckers twist in the wind. Let them clutch to their imaged sub-identities. I don't need them. I was born with mine.

But it isn't really true, now, is it?

Despite all of my protestations, I am still a Bananna Boy. Below the skin, any hint of Asian-ness is but a drop in the vast sea of a thru-and-thru Westernized Man. Plain yogurt with a splash of vanilla. I am not an alien in the strange, Western lands; I am a white man marginalized by the accident of birth and skin colour. It's almost a social disability -- like a lisp.

The last twenty years have been like playing dress up. Playing both, neither, one, or the other. But the core of core is always someone else. No one.

The preparation of the trip is a confrontation of the lie. I am not ready. I will be a stranger in my yellow skin to the billions of other yellow skins. A rough rock dropped into the stream in warble twists.

It's all in the little things. The thousands of small affections in speech and manner to portray the persona of a certain kind of person. But my persona -- as a architype -- only exists here. I won't be me outside of North America; the social self I wish to project cast too short of a shadow to span oceans.

I mean here, I know how fast I am suppose to walk in the subway to tell people that I am too tough to rob. What is a "brisk and confident" pace in Hong Kong?